BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist (1934) Antonin Artaud   Blue of Noon (1935) Georges Bataille   Literature and Evil (1957) Georges Bataille   Bataille, philosopher and 'intellectual', and Artaud, a 'major figure of the French avant-garde' were almost exact contemporaries. I may have more to write about the former in due course but I am afraid that in this review I am somewhat inclined to take my axe to them.  Artaud's dramatic text Heliogabalus is certainly a curiosity - one part flummery, one part insanity and one part genius. It is an account of sorts of the decadent teenage androgynous Emperor Heliogabalus. Blue of Noon is a minor work that I suspect Bataille did not want published and Literature and Evil is a collection of essays on the margins of French intellectual life in the 1950s. Not that the average reader (in which category I include myself) will have an earthly idea what Heliogabalus is all about (given the limits of a modern education) unt

The Dedalus Book of the Occult (2003) Gary Lachman The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence (2007)   Kirsten Lodge (Editor) The Dedalus Book of the Occult (subtitled The Dark Muse ) is one of Gary Lachman's lighter weight excursions into the history of the esoteric but it is well worth having in the Library. In effect, it is a series of suggestive and rather entertaining biographies from the Enlightenment world of Swedenborg, Mesmer and Cagliostro to the modernist occultism of the much less well known Daumal, Milosz and Lowry. There are just over 40 of these pen portraits under five occultist headings (Enlightenment, Romantic, Satanic, Fin de Siecle and Modernist) with good short introductions to each section. It is a book that can be usefully 'dipped into' whenever one of the 40 pops up somewhere else. The last quarter or so is a smattering of original texts, perhaps somewhat hard to fathom out of their full context and in an order that may have its own occult mea